As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue 85% and increase sales and partnerships 58%. An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.Benefits of Social Media According to Marketers Worldwide, Nov 2011 % of respondents

via Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition – eMarketer.

2 GlobalWebIndex 6 trends – January 2012.

“Why not call it a new kind of analytics?” says Professor Bogost, a founding partner at Persuasive Games, a firm that designs video games for education and activism. “Companies could say, ‘Well, we are offering you a new program in which we watch your every move and make decisions about our advertising based on the things we see you do.’ ”

via Employers and Brands Use Gaming to Gauge Engagement – NYTimes.com.

Compared to 2009–2010, the usage of blogs, online video in social media, message/bulletin boards, podcasting and Myspace were all down. There was also a 50% decrease from 2010 in Inc. 500 companies who said they used no social media marketing tools.

Social Media Tools Currently Used by Inc. 500 Companies, 2009-2011 (% of respondents)

via Correlating Social Media Success with Marketer Usage – eMarketer.

A new year on the calendar means new hope, new opportunities, new products, new trends and, most important of all, new budgets for many marketers. And while you’ll get served your share of predictions for the year ahead, here are five things you can bank on happening in social media.

via Social Media: Five Facts to Bank On in 2012 | DigitalNext: A Blog on Emerging Media and Technology – Advertising Age.

veryone is looking for the easy way.

Social media participants are not exempt. Many people create automated accounts with RSS feeds to share other people’s news, thoughts and commentary with their community. Some will link all of their social media so it only takes one blog post or tweet to populate their social media world.

Many social media members don’t reply to comments made by people who take the time to acknowledge their work. Some do the minimum just to say they are using social media. They repurpose industry news and rarely offer an original thought. Seriously, setting up an account on Facebook and Twitter is not active social media.

Passive, unengaged social media earns passive results.

via Passive Social Media Creates Passive Results | Rosh Sillars.

You already know that social networking sites have been getting huge around the world, but an annual report out today from comScore shows what exactly is going at a wonderful new level of detail, with surprises for even long-time industry watchers like me.

1 in every 5 minutes of time online is now being spent on social networking sites, up from a mere 6% in early 2007. The sites, led by Facebook, now reach 82% of the world’s internet-using population — about 1.2 billion people in total. This growth is happening across countries, with 41 of the 43 countries that the web measurement firm tracks showing penetration of 85% or more.

Within these big numbers, though, all sorts of differences emerge. People in Latin America spend an especially large portion of their time online on sites like Facebook and Twitter — 28%, or 7.6 hours per month. That’s much less the case in Asia, where it’s 11% and less than 3 hours per month. Those are broad averages, and full of anomalies. The Philippines, for example, is actually the most socially networked country in the world, with 43% of users time going to these services, and above 8.7 hours.

via ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook Leading, Microblogging Growing, World Connecting | TechCrunch.

Nice slideshare by comscore about social media

(4) Top 10 need-to-knows_about_social_networking_and_where_it_is_headed.

The hypermedia movement, spearheaded by people like HTML5 developer Mark Boas and the Mozilla Foundation’s Ben Moskowitz, wants to make the remix and curation of audio and video sources as easy as Carvin’s countless retweets. The end goal is that “someone with a laptop in a coffee shop can do a very compelling news report,” Moskowitz told me a few days ago during a phone call with me and Boas.

via Will 2012 be the year of hypermedia? — Tech News and Analysis.

These days, Social/Local/Mobile seems to be driving much of the conversation about online opportunities. But at the end of the day, there is only one constant common denominator across the Web: the consumer. An understanding of this consumer and how they are influenced by social, mobile and local experiences online is vital to big brands looking to reach them on the Web. Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, illustrate some findings that highlight digital consumer behaviors and consumption patterns that can help brand advertisers understand their most valuable customers and how they’re engaging across social, local and mobile.

via Infographic: The Most Valuable Digital Consumers | Nielsen Wire.